For consumers, there was no hiding: after all, there is no online equivalent of discreetly checking out a magazine while a bookstore employee is looking the other way. Amazon.com has pretty much saved all user data from its beginning.

Back then, customers had no choice but to share their intentions with firms. If a technology enthusiast wanted to find out if a website sold a particular surveillance device, there was no shortcut but to type some keywords into a search box and therefore give the company a valuable intention stream. Companies, therefore, had all the power. Many tried too hard to push products and advertisements. The consumer had no voice.

During the first data revolution, successful companies gained power by collecting, aggregating, and analyzing the customer data they collected. However, most companies did not know what to do and ended up burying their data in tombs.

Today, the online world has shifted to a model of collaboration and explicit data creation. Successful firms develop systematic ways to encourage and reward users who contribute honest data. A good system does not try to trick customers into revealing demographics or contact information that is useful for the company. Rather, it rewards users with information that is useful to them.

For users, switching costs are cheap — firms can no longer think of “customer relationship management” as providing stickiness for the customer (just like fly paper provides stickiness to the fly). Industries such as real estate and automobiles whose business models are built on information asymmetries will quickly lose their revenues to those who increase transparency using data contributed by consumers.

Big Data is a term applied to data sets whose size is beyond the ability of commonly used software tools to capture, manage, and process the data within a tolerable elapsed time. Big data sizes are a constantly moving target currently ranging from a few dozen terabytes to many petabytes of data in a single data set.

Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have found that when just 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will always be adopted by the majority of the society. The scientists, who are members of the Social Cognitive Networks Academic Research Center (SCNARC) at Rensselaer, used computational and analytical methods to discover the tipping point where a minority belief becomes the majority opinion. The finding has implications for the study and influence of societal interactions ranging from the spread of innovations to the movement of political ideals.

An important aspect of the finding is that the percent of committed opinion holders required to shift majority opinion does not change significantly regardless of the type of network in which the opinion holders are working. In other words, the percentage of committed opinion holders required to influence a society remains at approximately 10 percent, regardless of how or where that opinion starts and spreads in the society.

One of the networks had each person connect to every other person in the network. The second model included certain individuals who were connected to a large number of people, making them opinion hubs or leaders. The final model gave every person in the model roughly the same number of connections.

“In general, people do not like to have an unpopular opinion and are always seeking to try locally to come to consensus. We set up this dynamic in each of our models,” said SCNARC Research Associate and corresponding paper author Sameet Sreenivasan. To accomplish this, each of the individuals in the models “talked” to each other about their opinion. If the listener held the same opinions as the speaker, it reinforced the listener’s belief. If the opinion was different, the listener considered it and moved on to talk to another person. If that person also held this new belief, the listener then adopted that belief.

The researchers are now looking for partners within the social sciences and other fields to compare their computational models to historical examples. They are also looking to study how the percentage might change when input into a model where the society is polarized. Instead of simply holding one traditional view, the society would instead hold two opposing viewpoints. An example of this polarization would be Democrat versus Republican.

However, rising concerns about privacy may erode consumer trust and create a backlash against companies that harness web-based data without providing effective security. Instead, academics, statisticians and computer scientists are developing new approaches to organizing data that can provide much of the benefit of individual-level data — but without as much risk, Bradlow notes. Some companies collect more personal information than they really need, creating greater potential for a damaging breach, he says, adding that firms should think carefully about what data is essential and ignore the rest.

Government, he argues, is needed to combat instances of state-sponsored cyber attacks, which he predicts are likely to become more common unless countries work together to agree on rules for cyber warfare. Victims of cyber attacks need to rely on government “cyber cops” to detect and punish criminals, he suggests. “That job cannot be left to private companies.”

The cloud presents additional challenges, Hosanagar says, because it eliminates one kind of threat but introduces another. He points out that in the cloud, data and applications are managed away from the individual user, typically by information professionals who can keep systems up-to-date with software updates and virus protection. “The flip side,” he notes, “is that a lot of critical data is centralized. As a result, it creates a single point of failure and an attractive target for attack.”

Legal penalties, she notes, have not been swift or severe, leaving corporate counsels with little ammunition to convince top management to devote more resources to cyber security. She adds that companies, particularly during an economic downturn, find it hard to justify an investment in security because it may not generate easily identifiable, short-term returns. Data security, however, has long-term implications because a loss of consumer faith or trade secrets could have major implications for a company.

“No piece of code will ever be truly secure,” Matwyshyn says. “It’s a language used and written by humans and for humans…. The question is not whether there are flaws, but how companies and governments respond.”

Telco 2.0 hopes that this translates into increased senior-level appreciation that customers’ data should be seen an asset class in its own right and one where telco’s have significant potential mining opportunities.

We are however, more sceptical regarding the industry’s answer to the call for more open collaboration and sharing across the industry. Although it is understandable that operators should look to seek competitive advantage (and hence be quite protective about any insight or advantage they may be able to secure through piloting), this is one area where true competition is more likely to come from the Internet players and/or a more general “lock-down” from concerned public authorities “snuffing-out” innovation before it takes root.

“The number of hours per evening that students were using this was completely off the charts,” Kapor said. “The lessons we can draw from that are that almost all applications are going to have a social layer to them. We’re still going to be living in a world where one size does not fit all. There will be both broad platforms like Facebook, and verticals in lots of different areas like e-commerce, travel and education. But if something isn’t fundamentally social, it’s not going to be viable.”

Although a common lament among companies is that interacting with consumers via social media means giving up a measure of control over brand strategy, Katz argued that many firms are fooling themselves in that respect. Echoing a comment he heard from the CEO of JetBlue, he noted that “social media eliminates the illusion that you actually have control. [Companies] always thought they had control over a brand and control over the message because they weren’t hearing the conversations that [consumers] were having. People are always talking about your brand in ways you can’t control.”

Vic Gundotra, a Google senior vice president, told the Wall Street Journal that “fundamentally we believe online sharing is broken.” He continued, “We’re not going to nail it on our first attempt, but we’ll work as long as it takes.”

Big publishers, he adds, “are undoubtedly very nervous” about the impact that this initiative — and its possible success — might have “on the willingness of future potential Rowlings to cut the old-style deal rather than reserved-rights deals.” Of course with the typical first-time writer, a publisher does not have any guarantee of huge sales, he notes. “I would expect the main consequence of this to be different royalty rates for digital sales, not wholesale changes in boilerplate terms.” He predicts that the success of sites like Pottermore will depend on how much distinctive content they can offer.

“data are the oil of the 21st century” – pretty accurate. Don’t agree with the rest, trust doesn’t replace privacy. Privacy is an issue of autonomy, not related to trust but to independence and checks & balances on power that would take it away. Trust is often a way of describing situation where I have no choice but to accept something hoping my weaker position won’t be abused. Not good enough. Scary stuff in fact as it seems to neglect individual empowerment, trading it in for elusive trust frameworks. Privacy can never go away as it’s essential to one’s identity.

Trust Frameworks offer a combination of contractual, policy, technology and governance mechanisms whereby a baseline criterion of privacy and sharing can be transparently and independently monitored and enforced. The role of governments is to set baseline performance metrics, and then have independent entities audit and enforce those criteria. Trust Frameworks will need to be internationally “interoperable” with respect to both technology and policy.

By making the individual the locus of control, there is the unexpected benefit to individuals and corporations alike to increase the flow and the economic value of data.

The short answer is convenience, empowerment, money and services tailored just for them. Consumers can be paid for their data. Passwords go away. So does spam and suspicions about who has my data or who might be playing online games with my kids. My mobile phone becomes a trusted platform for vital services – health, financial, educational, professional, entertainment and personal. It knows an enormous amount about me: where I am, whom I talk to, text, and email; what I buy, my friends, colleagues, my unique interaction patterns. It can be a trove of valuable, even life saving data. Or it can be an instrument of Orwellian control. Trust Frameworks can make such mobile platforms useful, safe and democratic.

According to the Pew Internet survey, 18% of wireless Internet users are tracking their own healthcare data, twice as many as those who do not have a wireless-enabled device. Open health data can spur better decisions for mobile users if they have access to a smartphone or tablet and the Internet. Without it, not so much.

unsupported statements about how the world is changing. Well, the world is almost always changing and often for far the worse. Yes, the internet is an amazing thing but it is not going to bring all the goodness envisaged without more than just simply stating that change is happening and adding a couple of interesting videos. Getting fed up with people stating things that are far from obvious or inevitable, without supporting it with some substance. There is nothing inherently necessary in the internet and related technology and emergent stuff to to ‘crumble the old systems’. Far from it, the old systems are rather intent on co-opting or taming the internet. And blind faith in the technology/goodness/something magical prevailing in the end is unwarranted at best and naive at worst.

Thanks to the rise of social media, news is no longer gathered exclusively by reporters and turned into a story but emerges from an ecosystem in which journalists, sources, readers and viewers exchange information. The change began around 1999, when blogging tools first became widely available, says Jay Rosen, professor of journalism at New York University. The result was “the shift of the tools of production to the people formerly known as the audience,” he says. This was followed by a further shift: the rise of “horizontal media” that made it quick and easy for anyone to share links (via Facebook or Twitter, for example) with large numbers of people without the involvement of a traditional media organisation. In other words, people can collectively act as a broadcast network.

Many journalists who were dismissive about social media have changed their tune in the past few months as their value became apparent in the coverage of the Arab uprisings and the Japanese earthquake, says Liz Heron, social-media editor at the New York Times.

The staff in Al Jazeera’s Arabic and English newsrooms had, as it happened, undergone intense social-media training only the month before. “It was just in time,” says Moeed Ahmad, the network’s head of new media. Although Al Jazeera had used material from the internet in its coverage before, in Tunisia there was no other choice, because it had no reporters on the ground. With its journalists freshly trained in the use of such material, theory was quickly put into practice.

Instead of flying a reporter somewhere to cover a story, Al Jazeera can draw upon networks of trusted volunteers whose credibility has been established. It also has a website, called Sharek, where photos and videos can be submitted for use (once verified) in Al Jazeera’s television and online reports.

All this raises the question whether some stories may be better covered by constantly updated streams of tweets than by traditional articles. By providing more raw material than ever from which to distil the news, in short, social media have both done away with editors and shown up the need for them. News organisations are already abandoning attempts to be first to break news, focusing instead on being the best at verifying and curating it, says Mr Newman. But like other aspects of journalism, this role is now open to anyone.

The adblocking revolution is months away (with iOS 9) – with trouble for advertisers, publishers and Google | The Overspill: when there’s more that I want to say “discussion of this post on Hacker [...] […]

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